My parents never understood why I became a horsey child. Their infant rides on seaside donkeys don’t seem to have had the profound effect that a small black pony had on me.

We were holidaying in a great-aunt’s caravan at Rhuddlan in North Wales. I only remember little details, like the crocheted blankets on my bed, like the smell of matches and of the gas-ring that popped softly into life under the magical whistling kettle, like being exhorted to move carefully about the caravan when grown-ups were drinking tea. I must have been two and a half.

I had, so the story goes, been induced to “be good” all day by the promise that I could have what I asked for at bedtime. My mother fondly imagined this would be a “blow-blow” – my term for a toy windmill on a stick, which I’d longed for on a previous holiday. I can only guess at the parental dismay when I asked to “stand up close to a horse”.

I don’t really remember the animal in question. My adult knowledge tells me that it was small, and black, and probably a Shetland. But I had seen other children stroking it and feeding it bits of carrot, or sitting on it and being led sedately up and down the grassy lanes between the caravans. I desperately wanted to cuddle something so big and gentle and furry, perhaps even to sit up high and look down on the world from the kind of height that grown-ups had achieved.

My mother bravely asked the young lady – who was ready to pack up for the day – what the cost of a pony ride might be. Half a crown was five times the cost of the gaudy plastic windmill she had expected to buy, and she hooted and shook her head, which I well knew meant, “No chance!” Even more crushingly, unless you were five years old it seemed you wouldn’t be allowed to ride anyway. I hid my disappointment by pulling some heads of “creepygrass”, the wild barley whose whiskery heads, if inserted between your arm and your jumper sleeve, would creep from wrist to armpit in a few minutes of play. Mum, haggling nobly on my behalf, eventually brought the triumphant news that I could sit on the pony for a few minutes “before it went to bed.”

Truthfully, I can’t remember a thing about it.

Further holidays are marked in my memory by strictly limited visits to the Rhyl funfair, whose main attraction for me was the pony ride. The premises were strangely constructed of inclined and intertwined wooden walkways, so that you were always going up or down or over other walkways, enabling you to ride perhaps four hundred yards in a space not much bigger than a back garden. You ended up at the hitching rails where you’d got on, where your family were impatient to whisk you away from the pungent smell of sawdust, horse manure and urine to the delights of the Waltzer, the Dodgems, the Tunnel of Love or the Helter Skelter. Most of them made me feel dizzy or sick. Only the railway ride round the lake was any substitute for my bored, but adored, four legged friends.

I have no explanation for my obsession, except perhaps that I was born in December under Sagittarius, and that my great-grandfather Davenport was recorded in 1878 as being a “coachman (domestic)”. All my other ancestors had solid English occupations such as “Pressman in a candle factory” or “Ironfounder”. One was both a “Detective Sub-inspector” and a “Foreign correspondent” – with a German diplomat father and a French mother, he struck an exotic note of which the other relatives would probably have been rather suspicious. God only knows why I took after the horsey ancestor, but I did, and duly made my suburban family’s lives a misery with the repeated question: “Can I have a pony?”

They appeased my hunger with equine books each birthday and Christmas. One of these, titled “Prize Pony” by Kathleen McKenzie, was being promoted by a competition for children, in which the best essay about what you would do if you won a pony would win you – erm – a pony. At seven I already fancied my chances, and promptly wrote my piece and copied it out in my best handwriting. I tried hard to be patient during the weeks leading up to the competition deadline, but I’m sure my parents got fed up of trying to find answers to questions such as, “If the postman brings me a pony how will he get it through the letterbox? Can I keep it? Can it live in the back garden? Can it sleep in the shed?”

The postman didn’t bring anything of the sort, of course, the reason being that some time after I’d gone to bed, my parents added a careful note to the organisers saying in effect, “If she wins, for God’s sake don’t give her the pony because we have nowhere to keep it.” It wasn’t until 21 years later that I became the responsible owner of a real live pony.

I must have got perilously close at seven though, because I eventually received one of six runner-up prizes – another pony book.

I still wonder occasionally, as I watch my equine friends munching the lawn, whether I really won.